John is a biblical name. Not naming your kid that because it’s also occasionally used as slang, is pants-on-head stupid. There’s also nothing wrong with Charlie.
Dick/Richard is the only one here I agree with. That is extremely commonly used slang, so it makes sense.
So do it the old fashioned way: socialize and network with people at industry events. Ageism is another issue that isn’t quite so easy to solve. Doesn’t that depend on the area more than anything?
Networking like that is how I found my job without a degree in computer science.
Networking - which I do - will only take you so far. I have a strong network but you still need to have the requirements for the job. Why would a company hire someone who doesn’t have the wanted skillset when they could find someone who does.
I only started really job hopping and taking my career seriously 10 years ago at 35. I’ve always had at least a half a dozen interviews and a minuscule number of rejections. My network got me to the interview without going through an ATS. My Resume Driven Development and knowing the game got me offers.
Ageism outside of the cool hip startup world is exaggerated. Most of the older developers confuse ageism with not keeping their skillset in sync with the market.
More complex question would be if I vape my dessert flavor with or without nicotine is that better for me than eating said dessert? I have had so many people tell me how they 'cant resist' sweets, and I'd rather vape my cake.
Before I switched from smoking 12-ish years ago my lungs would physically hurt in the morning and I would cough when I woke up. To me, and other people who legitimately view vaping as something that was life-changing in a very positive way that comes off as a very uncaring attitude. Vaping dramatically improved my health.
A lot of the resistance you describe comes from the fact that vaping is illegal in many countries (interestingly, smoking is legal in almost all of those places) and people living in places where vaping is legal, are concerned that there might be a push towards prohibition.
I agree with you that the amount of evidence we have is not conclusive and if you browse the various vaping forums online, you can see that most vapers openly admit that as well, the problem arises when the lack of conclusive evidence is used as an argument in favour of prohibition, that is what drives many vapers to respond.
In other words, if something is “possibly harmful but we’re not sure yet”, is that a sufficient reason for making it illegal? Most vapers think that the answer is no.
> people living in places where vaping is legal, are concerned that there might be a push towards prohibition
Spreading false, misleading information doesn't help legitimize your cause.
> the problem arises when the lack of conclusive evidence is used as an argument in favour of prohibition, that is what drives many vapers to respond
I haven't see anyone here doing that, I certainly haven't.
> In other words, if something is “possibly harmful but we’re not sure yet”, is that a sufficient reason for making it illegal? Most vapers think that the answer is no.
I do not thing there is any doubt that vaping is harmful to some degree (that appears to be the scientific consensus). The unresolved questions are "how harmful?" and "is it a net negative for society?". However, even if the answers are "almost as harmful as cigarettes" and "yes, it increases public health risks overall despite reductions in smoking", I still would not support banning e-cigs (though I would support advertising restrictions).
Random or ambiguous icons without text is a huge UX failure. You can’t assume people will know what it means aside from very obvious ones like the floppy disk save icon.
The floppy disk save icon might be “very obvious” to you. But how is a kid of this era who has never seen a 3.5” floppy disk supposed to know that that means save?
No, you can't. Since GDPR was rolled out, venture capital investments in the EU have dropped by a third.[1] According to that paper, the companies most hurt are early stage startups.
That presumes all early stage startups (as made in the US) are created equal, and any regression in their success rates is bad.
Given that 9/10 startups fail even without GDPR, it's not surprising that early stage cos form the Lion's share of failures, and it surely can't be good for any data that was slurped up during whatever these experiments at market fit were doing.
And given that the ultimate goal of GDPR is to protect privacy, it doesn't make sense to exempt startups, especially when the early stage stakes are high and a failure to squeeze out every drop of value legally possible out of your data (while your competitors do) could mean the death of your venture.
As such, comparing to American standards or even current European standards doesn't quite work when there's a clear shift of the moral bar for GDPR compliance.
You misunderstand the point I'm making. After GDPR, investments in early stage startups dropped by almost 50% in the EU. If you cut investment in half, you're going to cause some startups to fail that otherwise would have succeeded. Startups are a "hits" enterprise. Most fail. Some are mildly successful. A few are responsible for almost all of the upside. Cutting investment by 50% means that instead of getting a Dropbox and a Spotify, you'll only get a Dropbox. That missing upside is bad for the economy.
I'm saying that you can have GDPR or you can have a thriving startup ecosystem. The data shows that you can't have both.
Personally, I think the GDPR is a colossal waste of time that only benefits incumbents. I've had to help implement GDPR compliance at a company and it did absolutely nothing to protect the privacy of customers. However it did cost several hundred thousand dollars.
I fully understand your point that GDPR hasn't been good for investment or startups, and that that the likelihood of a startup succeeding to reach sustainability in the european field has significantly diminished. What I'm rejecting is that that's necessarily an undesirable state of affairs. Does the world really need the likes of Blur or DiscountMugs to succeed, when they have proven woefully incapable of protecting the most basic forms of user data?
The tech economy seeing such upheaval right now could be construed as a signal demonstrating how dependent it was on fundamentally unhealthy and untenable data practices that were previously endemic to the industry.
I'm sorry that you have had to spend a tonne of money to attain GDPR compliance. I imagine most "incumbents" have had to spend a good deal as well; I can only hope that the next generation of companies have learnt from your company's mistakes and to structure their data processes from day 1 to avoid accruing such sensitive data in the first place.
At any rate - a tech sector is possible. A thriving one, that can sustain as much employment? Maybe not quite, there'd have to be some adjustments; but the people would be better off. A tech sector with the same market cap? Unlikely, but we need to get over ourselves and question if preserving the techocracy's wealth is more important here.
> What I'm rejecting is that that's necessarily an undesirable state of affairs. Does the world really need the likes of Blur or DiscountMugs to succeed, when they have proven woefully incapable of protecting the most basic forms of user data?
Again, I'm saying that the cost is borne by all startups, not just the ones you don't like. For startups, the main cost of GDPR isn't fines, it's less investment money and more compliance costs. That means good startups and bad startups alike must pay the price. They have equal chances of being killed in the cradle by these costs.
> I'm sorry that you have had to spend a tonne of money to attain GDPR compliance. I imagine most "incumbents" have had to spend a good deal as well; I can only hope that the next generation of companies have learnt from your company's mistakes and to structure their data processes from day 1 to avoid accruing such sensitive data in the first place.
The costs weren't high because of anything we were doing that was out of the ordinary. GDPR affects you if you even keep source IP addresses in your server logs. It mandates processes as well as restrictions. You have to train employees. You have to pay lawyers to ensure your processes are compliant. Even if everything you're doing is totally unobjectionable, the costs are significant. Current evidence indicates that many new companies are solving this problem by incorporating outside of the EU and avoiding doing business with EU customers until they're large enough to afford the costs of compliance.
> A tech sector with the same market cap? Unlikely, but we need to get over ourselves and question if preserving the techocracy's wealth is more important here.
You seem to have a zero sum view of wealth. Tech companies create wealth. They make things people want. Preventing companies from existing doesn't help others (except for incumbents with inferior products).
> Cutting investment by 50% means that instead of getting a Dropbox and a Spotify, you'll only get a Dropbox. That missing upside is bad for the economy.
No no, if investment money disappears from tech, that means you get Dropbox and something else that isn't a tech company. The investment money doesn't just disappear into thin air, it gets invested into something else, a different kind of company, a different sector, some place that isn't dependent on privacy-violating ad-tech bullshit and selling user behaviours to make money.
If you read the paper I linked to, it says that the money is likely going to the US and other places outside of the EU. Capital can cross borders effortlessly.
From that paper: "Of course, there are caveats to these findings. First of all, GDPR has only been in effect in the EU for a short time, and the effects we’ve observed may be temporary, with investors potentially taking a wait-and-see approach."
Given the year-over-year trends shown in [0] I feel like one should not overemphasize the timeframe that article looked at. The decline seems to be relatively contained at best and future development is unclear at best. And honestly, who cares, even if we suddenly got 20% of startup failures due to GDPR concerns alone. If those concerns are reasonable I'm totally fine with that.
It's not due to larger industry trends. The paper shows that startups in the US got more funding in the same time period, including early stage startups.
I remember warning about this when GDPR was being considered. People said it wasn't a concern. Later in 2018 I linked to a draft whitepaper that showed a decline in funding for EU startups. People replied that it was a statistical fluke and that we needed more time before we could draw conclusions. Now it's been a full year and the US-EU investment disparity is higher than ever.
At this point I don't know what would change people's minds. It's like talking to climate change denialists. I get the same response: "There's not enough data. The data doesn't support that conclusion. Even if it did, the trade-offs are worth it."
Okay, let's say there is enough data and you are absolutely correct. How does that invalidate the "Even if it did, the trade-offs are worth it." response?
The US-EU funding disparity was always there, in my book this leads to less people copying ethically dubious startup patterns from their US counterparts. If GDPR is the sole reason for the decline... doesn't the benefit of the population, of quite a few countries, outweigh the impact on a few startup folks and their investors?
The EU doesn't prevent the "bad" startups from existing. They just prevent them from starting in the EU, which means the EU misses out on a lot of the potential upside.
Companies like Microsoft, Google, Uber, Facebook, and PayPal started in the US, but they eventually expanded to the rest of the world. Since those companies weren't founded in the EU, EU workers missed out on being early employees. That means those company cultures are far more American than they otherwise would be. The EU missed out on having those companies headquartered in Europe where they'd create more jobs, more wealth, and more profits that could be taxed. Having them headquartered in the EU would also make those companies easier to influence.
It's hard to quantify exactly how much these things matter, but I think the long term cost is far higher than the consumer benefits of GDPR.
> The EU doesn't prevent the "bad" startups from existing. They just prevent them from starting in the EU, which means the EU misses out on a lot of the potential upside.
To me that sentence just isn't logical. Yes, they'd prevent some them from starting in the European market with their exact original business model if they were starting out now (and not like half of them in the last millenium). None of them started out here back in their time so that sounds more like a question of market penetration than benefit for the startup culture anyhow. With the GDPR they will hopefully also prevent said market penetration for bad actors when the time comes for the next generation of startups.
If GDPR is the sole reason and, subsequently, the US chooses to foster such businesses to win in a market, more power to them. Your examples might be huge successes, but many of them are at this time considered to be either unethical (Facebook, for the most part; Google had their share of negative attention) or plain illegal (Uber for example still hasn't managed to really start out in Germany, let's throw in AirBNB for good measure - I think they were founded in about the same year - huge financial hit that leads users to break laws and contracts left and right).
The calculation of long term cost and benefit is honestly the point where this discussion switches from economical concerns to political, at least for me since I'm not versed enough in macroeconomics to begin to judge that and would always place society over monetary concerns. I'm sure neither of us can win over the other so I'd suggest we leave it at that.
You are comparing server logs containing your IP address to human trafficking. That's a fun bit of rhetoric, but it doesn't help anyone in this conversation discover what's true.
You are turning his argument about things being forbidden by the GDPR being in majority eroding to privacy into something about IP addresses, it's not a fair simplification. That actually doesn't help anyone in this conversation to decide if the privacy gains provided by GDPR are worth it or not.
Fair, but it's E2E by default, and only requires a (burner) email address to sign up. If you're careful, there's not much to be gleaned from the remaining data.
The point is that many state colleges provide ample education. Some provide very good education depending on what areas they specialize in.
USC (South Carolina) is #1 for international business, for example. As I recall we also had good engineering programs. I can't speak for the CS department, but I do know some very smart professors are there, since some of my friends did research there.
USC was the only college I applied to, and I had zero doubts that I'd ever get in (since I didn't go in for IB/business).
Now, networking is a totally different animal. Of course a lot of universities can't match the kind of networking that happens at Ivy leagues. For most people I don't think this is really an issue though as long as you go to a "good"ish university.
Or perhaps we can look into alternate systems that don't reward excruciating studying and working systems. Perhaps standardized testing like the SAT is fundamentally flawed and we need to figure out better assessment systems.
> South Korea has the 10th highest suicide rate in the world.
Note that this is also inflated due to an abnormally high elderly suicide rate due to some systemic factors.
> Although lower than the rate for the elderly, grade school and college students in Korea have a higher than average suicide rate.
One example alternative would be de-emphasizing the utmost need for a degree, and emphasizing trades as an alternative. Not everyone should need a degree, and from an academia standpoint it makes having a college degree relatively worthless and slowly turns universities into degree mills.
What sort of fair system would not reward very hard work and study with very high rewards? If Koreans culturally want a life more tipped towards academic achievement, who are we non-Koreans to tell them they're wrong or that their achievements should be invalidated in the name of equal outcomes.
Nobody intrinsically wants it. Nobody wants to go to school and then study until 7,9,11pm. Nobody wants to go to 3-6 private academies after school, every day, in order to study very hard to pass the 수능 college entrance exam. Nobody wants to study to an excruciating degree in order to have a chance to get into one of the top 3 universities, in order to have a good chance of being hired by the top 재벌[0] corporations like Samsung or as a civil servant, in order to work 11, 12 hour days for the rest of their adult lives. This is what over-competition (and over-emphasis of a college degree) does.
Think about being a parent and having children; do you honestly, sincerely think your kids would be better off literally studying the entire day, and during most of their childhood? The answer is no. Studying is important to an extent, but so is enjoying childhood and doing other things than studying all the time.
Korea only recently reduced the maximum legal working hours per week from 68 to 52. Korea also has an above average suicide rates in the 10s, 20s, and 30s (and much higher elderly suicide rate, since there are few programs for them). The outcome of the 수능 exam is so important for determining one's future that planes don't fly at that time, and workers head to work at a later hour than usual.
What's happening in Korea currently is a hyper rat race that looms over one's life from a young age. Nobody wants that, but it's inevitable due to the difficulties of finding a job in this economy.
I am not discussing whether or not work should equal reward. I'm saying there should be no need at all for this ridiculous amount of studying. The current system is fundamentally broken.
I think we are maybe discussing slightly different things: you're talking about Koreans in Korea, whereas I had in mind Asians and more specifically Koreans in the western world where they and their children frequently excel relative to native people who work less hard. This is a discussion about the SAT and not the 수능 exam after all.
User intertextuality proposed that maybe the SAT should be adjusted so it "doesn't reward excruciating studying and working systems". My point is that firstly, many people find studying to a deadline to be excruciating so let's dispense with the dramatic adjectives, and secondly, what kind of replacement for the SAT scheme would not reward hard work and study? Would it even be an exam at all? In any conceivable testing regime people who study and work harder to succeed will, on average, do better. That seems fundamental. Without changing it so much it's not an exam anymore, Koreans will seem to have a cultural advantage over other less hard-working cultures and why should they not? In America they are not forced to work crazy hours, by law or the economy or culture or anything else.
It's entirely possible for the SAT to remain exactly as it is, in a way that rewards study, without implying a Korea-style deathmarch cultural ethic.
There's a difference in normal studying for a deadline (which just sucks) versus studying all day, every day, to the extent that Korean-Koreans do. I have no idea about American-Koreans. Both countries have big standardized tests (SAT, 수능) but the SAT is nowhere near as important as the 수능.
I do think standardized testing is fundamentally broken, but for mass-grading of people there's no other real alternative I suppose. However, I don't think the SAT's job should also be trying to account for systemic issues in America and life.
Instead, college admission boards should look at background as well as SAT scores. I believe they do this already, but SAT scores should be even less emphasized. Beyond a very minimum level I don't think it's a really good indicator of a person at all.
Dick/Richard is the only one here I agree with. That is extremely commonly used slang, so it makes sense.